At about 5 P.M. we found ourselves at the junction of the Ziraja and the Blatnica, as we learnt from some peasants—for they never meet according to the Major. The peasants, who were dressed in the heavily ornamented quasi-Dalmatian costume of these mountains, and were of the type which it has pleased me to call Hunnish, were much delighted at a present of English needles from the ‘consuls.’
We now began ascending the Troghìr Planina by a faintly indicated woodman’s path, overshadowed by a beech-forest of finer growth than any we had yet seen, interspersed with equally majestic pines. Amongst these mysterious labyrinths we lost our path, and coming towards dusk on an inviting glade commanding a lovely mountain panorama, pitched on it as our place of bivouac for the night. Here we found no difficulty in collecting firewood for a cheery fire, and bracken enough to form a springy mattress; and having cooked our frugal supper, we submitted to be lulled to sleep by the chorus of tree-crickets above. The night was again fine; so that, except for the cold, which in the small hours of the morning was bitter—as it generally is when the camp fire has burnt down beyond recovery!—we passed a fairly comfortable night, till we were aroused by the droning of gnats in our ears, and were again on our way, before the sun.
But now we began to be beset by a difficulty which while in the forest zone of the mountains we had not anticipated—namely, the absence of water, caused by the porous character of the limestone rock; and though we succeeded in finding our path again, all the runnels we passed were dried by summer drought. The woods were very silent, and there was no morning song of birds beyond the cooing of a dove; but while we were resting we heard a deep musical hum among the tree-tops, proceeding from myriads of gnats, some of which were droning below. We kept gradually ascending the back of the Planina, our path continually disappearing or losing itself in a maze of lesser tracks, which might have been made as much by animals as by man; and every now and then we had to scramble on as best we could over tree-trunks of monstrous girth that barred our path. But still no water to make breakfast palatable! till about two hours after starting we came to a stagnant pool or puddle about the size of an ordinary washing-basin, which, as necessity knows no law, we were driven to make use of, and to pick the tadpoles out of our tea as best we might!
But how describe this forest scenery! how paint, so that others may see as we saw them, the golden rays of the rising sun slanting between the leafy tiers of the beeches, intersecting their shady trunks with pillars of light, shimmering beyond against the dark mountain flank; not dappling it in round noon-day patches, but streaking it horizontally with golden ripples, comparable to nothing but mackerel clouds glorified by the sunset, trailing across some darker tract of sky. Now and then the mighty trunks and branches frame vistas of mountain and valley, flooded still by a forest sea unflecked by habitation—an enamel of quiet blue. Then the luminous foliage of the beeches gives place for a while to more sombre pines, whose turpentiny fragrance floats like morning incense down the forest aisles. Hour after hour, as we ascend, the forest still looms around us, but the scenery is perpetually changing.
At one point we reached a mountain bluff more open to the wind, and found ourselves in a clearing not made by man. From the rocky summit an awful scene of ruin burst upon us. That soft blue heaven—azure and cloudless as a tranquil sea—it, too, has its storms and windy Scyllas to play havoc among these aërial masts. This was one universal wreck—the wreck of an Armada. Far and wide every tree had been struck down like Canaanitic walls. The very current of the tornado was marked by the lie of the prostrate trunks. At times a confused medley—piles of scarce distinguishable spars and giant hulks—jumbled together as if they had been nine-pins!—showed the eddy of a whirlwind; but generally the trunks were strewn pointing from the north-east like so many magnets: one vast torrent track of destruction marking the course of the Bora, the irresistible storm-wind of Illyria. In places we have found the periodic force of this wind utilized by the Bosniacs, who cut the trees a quarter through on the leeward side and leave the rest to the woodcraft of Boreas.
Tree struck by Lightning.
But once more we plunge into the primeval shadows to find ourselves among more isolated monuments of ruin. Here it is the artillery of heaven that has been playing on the masted swell of the green Planina. Now we have reached the very focus of an electric storm. The trunks of beech and fir sometimes riven asunder, more generally erect but decapitated, stripped of bark and branches; sometimes shattered columns charred by the aërial explosion, sometimes splintered up into trophies of white spears. Here is one of the most striking witnesses to the stupendous power of lightning that I have ever seen. A beech about eighty feet in height was snapped in two, the upper part hurled on to the slope below, the lower still rooted to the ground, but the hard wood splashed by the thunderer’s bolt—as when a bomb-shell strikes the sea—into gigantic splinters: keen, shapely blades, as much as twenty feet in length.[183]
Then, again, we passed through a region of pines, grim, time-stained—scarred and bereft of limbs in many a battle with the elements—with bare long arms and patriarchal beards of hoary lichen; an older generation of trees, waiting in vain for kindly axe or levelling blast; and awakening, in their Arctic desolation, memories of a Lapland forest-scene. And now once more a charming transformation takes place. Cheerful beech avenues again overarch us, or open out in sunny glades, where butterflies—commas, whites, clouded yellows—are fluttering and settling about yellow salvias and a flower which looked like a rosy phlox with a single blossom. Now we found, to our great relief, an icy-cold stream, and prepared our noon-day repast in a beechwood glen that carried us back to the chalk hills of old England. Here we recognized around us those old familiar ferns, the prickly and the maiden-hair[184]—polypody, flouncing the old stumps with charitable raiment—rarer tufts of blechnum; and, prying curiously among the beech-roots for another of our chalk-hill favourites, we found—sure enough!—that spiky shell[185] which seems to imitate the form and colour of the sheathed buds of the beech-leaves.
The track we now followed began to descend rapidly, and we discovered, after climbing down a considerable way, that we were on the wrong side of the watershed, so that there was nothing for it but to reascend as nearly as possible two thousand feet towards the main ridge of Troghìr which we had left.